Hey! Thanks for the tip. Too bad it requires deleting/renaming files and pretty much "breaking" the other language version, something that my school won't let me do for sure :poly122:
Hopefully teddy finds a way to get through this issue soon!.
Again, thanks. Also to teddy for all the work. Even if I can only use this tool at home, it's incredibly helpful!!.
Teddy, I gave this a shot and I'm extremely impressed with some of the results that I was able to get out of some photo references that were touched up with dodge and burn in greyscale. I ported the normal map over to crazybump and threw on a couple tweaks and generated other maps from it, and it came out pro.
There's just one issue that I've been having though, and it's that the green channel needs to be inverted in order for my normal map to display the lighting vectors properly. I could probably use on of my channel flipping scripts to do some of this stuff, but I think it would be a really good idea to have some axis flipping preferences built into the script in the future.
I'm using Max vectors for most of my stuff, but some other game engines may use something slightly different so having that in there would be handy for others as well.
EDIT: Also as mentioned earlier, the option to make the map tiling does not work in CS2. I worked around this by increasing the canvas size by 300%, cloning my tiling texture to the empty areas, and then shrinking it back down to the original canvas size.
When I run the plugin, I get a "z-shift" and "plane" layers locked, all is good until I run the plugin again to adjust the settings, it creates those again and clatter my PSD.
Am using CS3 + vista 64bit btw, cheers.
Hm, this is a first. Have you tried the preferences reset trick described earlier in the thread? If that doesn't work for you, lets get in touch via mail and sort this thing out: teddy.bergsman[AT]gmail.com
teddybergsman: thanks for the quick reply, unfortunately time is very tight here so I'll have to test the reset at a later time and get back to you on that.
Also you should be careful of posting your email here or anywhere else, as it will be picked up by spam bots.
btw I've found another bug where the script didn't work with a path present, deleting the path solved it.
could you rename instantiate into copy, because its not really an instance (like in max), if i change the values on one layer the other doesnt get changed (would be a little dumb if it would)
also, if one ads another layer, could you implement a short dialog which will make us able to rename the layers?
becauz right now i am to add materials to our material library here at work, but i guess when those textures will be implemented people would like to have another look at the generated normal map and it would be easier if they could be renameble
(e.g. HighFrequencyNoise || XYZ <- your data which is needed for the script and it starts checking the variables after the ||)
also i looked into making a quick 3d preview, actually started doing a little action by myself, all it does by now is make the texture a 3d postcard, zoom out a little, rotate the view, put a light into the scene and rotating the view back to the front (so the light doesnt come from the front, but the side)...
but i dont know how to automatically put a normal map into the material slot dynamically...
would you have any ideas how to make that better? are u even interested?
cuz right now my workflow is that i put down a plane in max, put the diffuse and normal on it and then do a few changes, refresh max, and so on...
refreshing max takes long (up to a minute on higher res maps) which is kinda annoying...
Great feedback, thank you! There is now a new nDo update with the following addons and changes:
- Added new button, "Rename", which enables renaming the selected normal. Also made the PSD structure a bit easier to read, by adding a spatious delimiter between the layer name and layer properties string.
- Added new button, "Duplicate", which generates a simple duplicate of the currently selected normal.
- Changed functionality of "Instantiate" button, which worked the way "Duplicate" does now. Instancing now links the duplicated normal with the previous one, so that whenever an instance is tweaked, all related instances conform to the same value tweaks.
- Updated functionality of "Transform" button. Now works for transforming instanced layers individually, before all layers that were linked became part of the same transform.
While I absolutely love this tool and enjoy to read through this thread even though I have neither the knowledge nor proper understanding of all this normal mapping stuff entirely, I'd love love love if you guys would show some nice pictures of where you could put it to good use and share some screenshots to enlighten the text heavy thread
Also this honorable gentleman could have some neat pictures to put on the projects site.
Anyways, Mr. teddybergsman, you're doing a wonderful job and get a lot of supercool and positive feedback which is great, i think
Also as usual great tutorial by PhilipK - still waiting for texture flats of your scifi-orange-room project btw
Thanks Philip! Acumen, that would indeed be very fun, I'd find it incredibly interesting to see what people are coming up with.
Also xXm0RpH3usXx,
I'm sorry, I forgot to thank you for the PS 3D links, I've been looking into it and it looks fully possible to implement the feature you are requesting. Feel free to mail me your action and I'll take a more in-depth look!
This is what I'm using your tool for right now!. It's a WIP and right now there's nothing really "amazing" so I will just link to the pics instead of posting them right here.
The object I'm working on now is some sort of server rack that I will use on my current project. I did the rack itself and then made some sketches with photoshop to decide what designs to go with - http://imgur.com/5YLob.jpg
Then I started working on the normal map (still nowhere nearly done) - http://imgur.com/NL1W0.jpg (all you see here done with your tool)
And here are two screenshots of the actual model with the normal applied. You can still see a LOT of places with nothing:
I basically got the simple shapes done first and I will start working on the complex shapes today, mixing normal baking from high poly stuff, and your tool.
Again, amazing tool and thanks for all the support!. If only the other languages issue got fixed soon so I could work on this at school too...
I'm having a problem with the 8800 error like Chai, however this comes from launching teddy, so i'm not even able to start the action. I'm on a windows 7 laptop, 64bit, tried it on cs4 and cs3, and i still keep getting that error, really sad cuz i wanna use this bad boy :P
Nobody is posting what they are doing with this, so I will just post an update on what I'm working on, as I got home a couple hours ago and had some time to play around some more.
Again, only link because it's still not worth the extra broadband it requires to display a pic :P As soon as I finish the prop (tonight or tomorrow morning - it's 10pm here already) I will post a pic with the diffuse, spec and glow too.
So I got this "8800 action "delete" is not aviable" error too after using the latest version of nDo for a while.
Here the description of what I did, might help track down the problem:
I create a rounded recangle shape as a Shape-layer, no path or selection.
Then I ran nDo and it gave me wierd results as expected.
Did one undo.
Converted the Shape-layer to a normal one (white shape, rest transparent).
Ran nDo aggain. -> Got the error.
EDIT:
I were not able to reproduce the error this way.
Thanks everyone for the great support. A minor, minor update this time (bigger ones on their way) - screen location is now remembered, so no more annoying centering after each restart.
Good stuff THE 5 and Mik2121, big thanks for sharing.
Congrats on the many downloads. As soon as you release the patch so that people from other regions can use it too, I bet the downloads will go up like crazy. The tool is just too useful to skip on it
LOL, With all these people all excited I feel bad for asking such a basic question. How do I actually install nDo and bring up the option window in PS CS4? I'm kinda an old school artist so I tend not to install plug-ins and actions a lot so when I opened the zip file I was a bit baffled as to what i needed to do with the files. Any help for the old school artists out there would be great! X-D
i tried using this for an hour or two and i have to say i was ready to punch a hole through my monitor, i was so raged. I read through the tutorials and all that, and i still cant get the hang of using this. ill have to practice some more, i really want to be able to use it correctly.
I believe there's a how-to installation guide on the nDO site, but anyway..
You have two options when installing nDO. One is to locate the folder on C: so that the address for the files inside would be C: \nDO\filename.
Once you do that, open PS and look for the Actions window (Alt + F9). Click on Load Action and look for the file inside the nDO folder that's selectable. Open it and it will be ready to work.
The other option, if you locate the nDO folder somewhere else, is to do the same as before, but after you click on Load Action, you have to delete the current script loaded inside the action ( nDO (c) Teddy > Scripts ), then press the record button on the Actions tab, go to File > Scripts > Browse, load the script file inside the nDO folder and let it do all the stuff it needs to (you will see it create new layers, open new files, etc..). Then when the settings interface shows up, close it and press the stop button on the Actions tab.
Hmm, i checked for that several times and didn't see it. all i was able to find was the link to download the zip file and another link to Philpk's site for how to use it. nothing for actually installing it and nothing to that effect in the zip file. I could be wrong but I just don't see it.
COOL! thanks Mik2121! the first way didn't work for me but the second one worked like a charm! Now i can see what all the excitement is about! And yeah i even quadruple checked it, I'm pretty sure the website doesn't cover this i think it should be added for the noobs in the group because outside of flip canvas and some other basic actions I almost never use the action pallet window for anything.
Just to make sure, this won't ever work on PS 7.0, right ?
I read it works with CS2-CS5 somewhere, yet I just tried to plug the action file to ps. Cavity map and overlay normal kinda works. Yet the important goods don't show up. "The Action "Scripts" is not available".
Copied folder to C:/ndo and moved the action into ps
Also I second the missing installtion information. Should be on cgted frontpage, not somewhere in a submenu of philk's tutorial site.
Getting:
Error4 Unterminated String Constant
Line 1132
-> "Default: Normal element.
Radius: 4; Intensity: 10
edit: Alright, too bad, but chances were small anyways. Thanks for making it crystalclear.
Acumen, it is not tested for 7.0 but I'm certain it will not run, I'm afraid. nDo relies heavily on Smart Objects, and these were first introduced in CS2.
Yes, sorry about the confusion about installation, this is something I will address. Currently there are two places to find this information on the site:
On the main page ("Home" tab), at the bottom center ("How to install")
Under the "Help!" tab, explained at the top ("How do I install nDo?").
I do however realize that this information needs to be more clearly communicated. The non-Silverlight version even lacks all installation links -- I will fix this. Anyways, thanks for helping each other out!
"Error 25: Expected: ;. Line: 1 -> 28]"
appears since I installed the new version? Thats sad cause its a really cool tool... Is there any fix for this?
BTW, and not trying to sound harsh but, is there any reason behind using Silverlight right now?.
It takes longer to load, doesn't work on certain computers and you have to keep up to date two versions of a page that you could do even with just HTML (not even CSS needed, hah!)
nDo now creates normals much faster, and output file size and Photoshop memory usage is now drastically reduced.
Naturally, the optimization is especially noticable in high resolution documents. For instance, a 2048^2 doc with 8 normal layers required 723MB of disk space before the update. After the optimization this number has dropped to 180MB.
I have two friends using Win7 and CS2 that have nDo working, however when they click transform or instantiate they can't move or rescale the object. The editable bounding box appears but trying to do anything results in nothing.
I thought I already posted this but I can't find my post.
a couple people are having issues with win7/CS2 where the transform/instatiate buttons aren't working correctly. They give the transform gizmo correctly but they can't move or resize the layer they're working on. Any ideas why this could be?
Also we've edited the dat file to flip the green channel and that works great. However when using cavity from normal the channel isn't flipped. Any work around aside from editing the action layer to manually flip it?
Oh no! I'm terribly sorry about this. I think I know what might have caused this issue, get the latest version and tell me if it works for you: http://cgted.com/nDo.zip
Oh no! I'm terribly sorry about this. I think I know what might have caused this issue, get the latest version and tell me if it works for you: http://cgted.com/nDo.zip
Replies
Hey! Thanks for the tip. Too bad it requires deleting/renaming files and pretty much "breaking" the other language version, something that my school won't let me do for sure :poly122:
Hopefully teddy finds a way to get through this issue soon!.
Again, thanks. Also to teddy for all the work. Even if I can only use this tool at home, it's incredibly helpful!!.
There's just one issue that I've been having though, and it's that the green channel needs to be inverted in order for my normal map to display the lighting vectors properly. I could probably use on of my channel flipping scripts to do some of this stuff, but I think it would be a really good idea to have some axis flipping preferences built into the script in the future.
I'm using Max vectors for most of my stuff, but some other game engines may use something slightly different so having that in there would be handy for others as well.
EDIT: Also as mentioned earlier, the option to make the map tiling does not work in CS2. I worked around this by increasing the canvas size by 300%, cloning my tiling texture to the empty areas, and then shrinking it back down to the original canvas size.
Thanks for sharing this with the community.
Cheers!
When I run the plugin, I get a "z-shift" and "plane" layers locked, all is good until I run the plugin again to adjust the settings, it creates those again and clatter my PSD.
Am using CS3 + vista 64bit btw, cheers.
This is a supported (although currently undocumented) feature. In nDo.dat, change
to
and your green channel will be inverted.
Chai,
Hm, this is a first. Have you tried the preferences reset trick described earlier in the thread? If that doesn't work for you, lets get in touch via mail and sort this thing out: teddy.bergsman[AT]gmail.com
Teddy
Also you should be careful of posting your email here or anywhere else, as it will be picked up by spam bots.
btw I've found another bug where the script didn't work with a path present, deleting the path solved it.
Cheers !
could you rename instantiate into copy, because its not really an instance (like in max), if i change the values on one layer the other doesnt get changed (would be a little dumb if it would)
also, if one ads another layer, could you implement a short dialog which will make us able to rename the layers?
becauz right now i am to add materials to our material library here at work, but i guess when those textures will be implemented people would like to have another look at the generated normal map and it would be easier if they could be renameble
(e.g. HighFrequencyNoise || XYZ <- your data which is needed for the script and it starts checking the variables after the ||)
also i looked into making a quick 3d preview, actually started doing a little action by myself, all it does by now is make the texture a 3d postcard, zoom out a little, rotate the view, put a light into the scene and rotating the view back to the front (so the light doesnt come from the front, but the side)...
but i dont know how to automatically put a normal map into the material slot dynamically...
would you have any ideas how to make that better? are u even interested?
cuz right now my workflow is that i put down a plane in max, put the diffuse and normal on it and then do a few changes, refresh max, and so on...
refreshing max takes long (up to a minute on higher res maps) which is kinda annoying...
Great feedback, thank you! There is now a new nDo update with the following addons and changes:
Get the latest version here: http://cgted.com/nDo.zip
Teddy
Also this honorable gentleman could have some neat pictures to put on the projects site.
Anyways, Mr. teddybergsman, you're doing a wonderful job and get a lot of supercool and positive feedback which is great, i think
Also as usual great tutorial by PhilipK - still waiting for texture flats of your scifi-orange-room project btw
Also xXm0RpH3usXx,
I'm sorry, I forgot to thank you for the PS 3D links, I've been looking into it and it looks fully possible to implement the feature you are requesting. Feel free to mail me your action and I'll take a more in-depth look!
Teddy
The object I'm working on now is some sort of server rack that I will use on my current project. I did the rack itself and then made some sketches with photoshop to decide what designs to go with - http://imgur.com/5YLob.jpg
Then I started working on the normal map (still nowhere nearly done) - http://imgur.com/NL1W0.jpg (all you see here done with your tool)
And here are two screenshots of the actual model with the normal applied. You can still see a LOT of places with nothing:
http://imgur.com/EeKDX.jpg
http://imgur.com/NQoLk.jpg
I basically got the simple shapes done first and I will start working on the complex shapes today, mixing normal baking from high poly stuff, and your tool.
Again, amazing tool and thanks for all the support!. If only the other languages issue got fixed soon so I could work on this at school too...
all others did on these specs:
PS CS 3 Extended on a Win Xp 64 Bit:poly127:
okay, nevermind... i dont know what i did wrong, but it works now, just tested with another texture and it works!...
http://imgur.com/FwmBy.jpg
Again, only link because it's still not worth the extra broadband it requires to display a pic :P As soon as I finish the prop (tonight or tomorrow morning - it's 10pm here already) I will post a pic with the diffuse, spec and glow too.
Here the description of what I did, might help track down the problem:
EDIT:
I were not able to reproduce the error this way.
As for some showcase of nDo works, this is what I got so far, nothing fancy ;p
http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/281/b/0/hightech_ground_tiles_02_by_the_5-d30bc5o.jpg
"JavaScript code was missing"
Im running vista x64 Photoshop CS2. im gonna try updating java.
try this maybe?
Thanks everyone for the great support. A minor, minor update this time (bigger ones on their way) - screen location is now remembered, so no more annoying centering after each restart.
Good stuff THE 5 and Mik2121, big thanks for sharing.
Get the latest here: http://cgted.com
Teddy
You have two options when installing nDO. One is to locate the folder on C: so that the address for the files inside would be C: \nDO\filename.
Once you do that, open PS and look for the Actions window (Alt + F9). Click on Load Action and look for the file inside the nDO folder that's selectable. Open it and it will be ready to work.
The other option, if you locate the nDO folder somewhere else, is to do the same as before, but after you click on Load Action, you have to delete the current script loaded inside the action ( nDO (c) Teddy > Scripts ), then press the record button on the Actions tab, go to File > Scripts > Browse, load the script file inside the nDO folder and let it do all the stuff it needs to (you will see it create new layers, open new files, etc..). Then when the settings interface shows up, close it and press the stop button on the Actions tab.
Hopefully I explained myself well enough..
^ how to install
I read it works with CS2-CS5 somewhere, yet I just tried to plug the action file to ps. Cavity map and overlay normal kinda works. Yet the important goods don't show up. "The Action "Scripts" is not available".
Copied folder to C:/ndo and moved the action into ps
Also I second the missing installtion information. Should be on cgted frontpage, not somewhere in a submenu of philk's tutorial site.
Getting:
edit: Alright, too bad, but chances were small anyways. Thanks for making it crystalclear.
- New dropdown, "Master", which lets you apply predefined settings to the current normal element.
- Accompanying button, "New...", which lets you add custom settings to the "Master" dropdown.
Get it here: http://cgted.comAcumen, it is not tested for 7.0 but I'm certain it will not run, I'm afraid. nDo relies heavily on Smart Objects, and these were first introduced in CS2.
Yes, sorry about the confusion about installation, this is something I will address. Currently there are two places to find this information on the site:
- On the main page ("Home" tab), at the bottom center ("How to install")
- Under the "Help!" tab, explained at the top ("How do I install nDo?").
I do however realize that this information needs to be more clearly communicated. The non-Silverlight version even lacks all installation links -- I will fix this. Anyways, thanks for helping each other out!Teddy
"Error 25: Expected: ;. Line: 1 -> 28]"
appears since I installed the new version? Thats sad cause its a really cool tool... Is there any fix for this?
Greetings
It takes longer to load, doesn't work on certain computers and you have to keep up to date two versions of a page that you could do even with just HTML (not even CSS needed, hah!)
[ame]
(just realised the preview pic looks shitty, thats yts fault, gets better after clicking play)
nDo now creates normals much faster, and output file size and Photoshop memory usage is now drastically reduced.
Naturally, the optimization is especially noticable in high resolution documents. For instance, a 2048^2 doc with 8 normal layers required 723MB of disk space before the update. After the optimization this number has dropped to 180MB.
Thanks for sharing the video, xXm0RpH3usXx!
Teddy
download the latest version but again, I get the error message :
"Error 25: Expected: ;. Line: 1 -> 28]"
Like this tool, but can't use it at the moment
Which version of Photoshop are you using and which operating system? Has previous versions of nDo worked for you?
Looking forward to your reply,
Teddy
I'm using Photoshop CS5 on a Win7 64bit System. Yes older versions worked...
v.0.5.1 worked...
Thanks for your help
i'm working with exactly the same specs at home and it works for me...
Tips?
a couple people are having issues with win7/CS2 where the transform/instatiate buttons aren't working correctly. They give the transform gizmo correctly but they can't move or resize the layer they're working on. Any ideas why this could be?
Also we've edited the dat file to flip the green channel and that works great. However when using cavity from normal the channel isn't flipped. Any work around aside from editing the action layer to manually flip it?
Error -29: Uncaught Exception Sho, Line:1356 -> m_NormalEditorShow();
Worked previously on CS2
I also updated to latest version today.Got a similar error.
"SyntaxError: Expected;"
Previous versions were working fine with Photoshop CS2 on Windowx XP SP2 64bit
THanks
Same for me at work. Not sure how to fix it. Great plugin though!
Same problem on my machine at work. I'm on Photoshop CS4 on Windows XP. Happens since the last update.
Please fix it ted because I can't live without this tool anymore!!
Thanks for all the hard work so far!
Best of luck,
Teddy
Same problem
Best wishes,
Teddy